Who are these like stars appearing  

The German original of this hymn, Wer sind die vor Gottes Throne, is by Heinrich Theobald Schenk (1656-1727), who lived most of his life in Giessen, Germany.  He attended the local Grammar School and the University of Giessen later becoming the Praeceptor Classicus in the Grammar School.  In 1689 he was appointed town preacher in the Stadtkirke--the town church--of Giessen.   Schenk’s hymn, of 1719, is based on Revelation 4:4 and 7:13-17 (but headed by a line from Revelation 21:7).  It is in 20 6-line stanzas comprising an alternate-rhyme quatrain and a rhyming couplet.  Schenk wrote no other hymns.  The translation we sing is that of Frances Elizabeth Cox (1812-1897), who translated 14 of Schenk’s stanzas.  Modern hymnals usually reduce the number of stanzas to five.  Cox was the daughter of George Valentine Cox, headmaster of New College School in Oxford and himself a translator of German (prose) and a writer.  She chose hymns from Versuch eines allgemeinen evangelischen Gesang- und Gebetbuchs (Hamburg 1833), collected by Baron Charles Christian von Bunsen, the Ambassador of Prussia to the Court of St James.  Cox published 50 of her translations in Sacred Hymns from the German in 1841, dedicating the book to Bunsen and to Edward Denison, Bishop of Salisbury.  In 1864 she published a second collection, increasing the number of translations to 56.  In both books the German and English texts are on facing pages.  Cox’s faithful translations preserve not only the metres of the German, but also the rhyme schemes.  The first two lines of this hymn are Cox’s revision of 1864.  Another of her translations is “Jesus lives! Thy terrors now/Can no more, O Death, appall us.”

 

The tune associated with this hymn is by an unknown German composer; it appeared in print first in Geistriches Gesangbuch, published in Darmstadt in 1698.  The tune is known variously as “All Saints,” “All Saints Old,” and “Darmstadt.”  It was paired with Schenk’s words in 1719 in Neuvennerhtes Gesangbuchlein.  William Henry Monk harmonized it for the first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), of which he was musical editor.